Health Information Management

Strategy: Put CDI benchmarks in yearly evaluations

CDI Strategies, November 15, 2007

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Running a clinical documentation improvement (CDI) program using embedded staff (e.g., case managers, coding/HIM) instead of dedicated CDI specialists can prove challenging. The pressures of normal day to day activities-managing length of stay, or coding charts in a timely manner-can pull non-specialized staff away from the important task of ensuring that physician documentation is the best that it can be.

Although she does not recommend the practice, if your hospital does use embedded employees to staff its CDI program, don't forget to include CDI accountability benchmarks in their yearly evaluations, says Marion Kruse, MBA, RN, managing consultant for Navigant Consulting in Chicago, IL. This step will ensure that they don't relegate their CDI efforts to the back-burner, Kruse says.

"If you give the CDI role to embedded staff, understand that statistically you're not going with best practice. But by putting it into their yearly evaluations, this at least covers the bases," she says.



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